Did anyone ever figure out what the Oval Office Squatter thought he was talking about?

… My short non-biologist summary would be this: it’s fairly wet and cold in Finland so it’s pretty different. They don’t use rakes to avoid forest fires. Their big problem is bog fires. Many of the best parts of JI’s letter are cris de coeur, insisting on the non-role of rakes in any part of Finnish forage management.

On behalf of all TPM Readers, thank you to TPM Reader JI and we’re sorry about the Trump thing…

On that, we can certainly agree.

Also informative, and infinitely more depressing, is the new report from ProPublica/NYTimes — “Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe”:

… The dirt road was ruler straight, but deep holes and errant boulders tossed our tiny Toyota back and forth. Trucks coughed out black smoke, their beds brimming over with seven-ton loads of palm fruit rocking back and forth on tires as tall as people. Clear-cut expanses soon gave way to a uniform crop of oil-palm groves: orderly trees, a sign that we had crossed into an industrial palm plantation. Oil-palm trees look like the coconut-palm trees you see on postcards from Florida — they grow to more than 60 feet tall and flourish on the peaty wetland soil common in lowland tropics. But they are significantly more valuable. Every two weeks or so, each tree produces a 50-pound bunch of walnut-size fruit, bursting with a red, viscous oil that is more versatile than almost any other plant-based oil of its kind. Indonesia is rich in timber and coal, but palm oil is its biggest export. Around the world, the oil from its meat and seeds has long been an indispensable ingredient in everything from soap to ice cream. But it has now become a key ingredient of something else: biodiesel, fuel for diesel engines that has been wholly or partly made from vegetable oil…
Most of the plantations around us were new, their rise a direct consequence of policy decisions made half a world away. In the mid-2000s, Western nations, led by the United States, began drafting environmental laws that encouraged the use of vegetable oil in fuels — an ambitious move to reduce carbon dioxide and curb global warming. But these laws were drawn up based on an incomplete accounting of the true environmental costs. Despite warnings that the policies could have the opposite of their intended effect, they were implemented anyway, producing what now appears to be a calamity with global consequences.

The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe. The unprecedented palm-oil boom, meanwhile, has enriched and emboldened many of the region’s largest corporations, which have begun using their newfound power and wealth to suppress critics, abuse workers and acquire more land to produce oil.

We arrived at another plantation and stopped near where a stream coursed through the bog. People still lived here: A mother bathed two children beneath a culvert, and a shirtless young boy ran through row after row of identical young palms in the distance, surrounded by dragonflies and sparrows. The uniformity of the world he was growing up in was striking, like the endless plains of drilling rigs in an East Texas oil field. It was, in a way, an astounding achievement, the ruthless culmination of mankind’s long effort to extract every last remaining bit of the earth’s seemingly boundless natural wealth. But it was also frightening. This was what an American effort to save the planet looked like. It was startlingly efficient, extremely profitable and utterly disastrous…

I never used palm oil in making soap because of the environmental impact, but I have become aware of sources of sustainable palm oil from Malaysia and Ecuador so I occasionally will use it now in some recipes. It’s easier to avoid it, but I want to support the sustainable movement too, because success spreads.

My friends in Paradise lost everything but they are going to be ok. They sent me this about their neighbors so I thought I’d post it. Don’t bother with explanations of why you can’t contribute, I get it.

My daughter and son-in-law 3 grandkids lost their home in the camp fire they have no renters insurance, daughter worked at Ace hardware and son-in-law worked at rental guys living paycheck to paycheck,not rich, in between middle class & poor. They were is spirt& love. I’m just there mom trying to raise money for them to get a place to live. Anything will help. ￼

@Amir Khalid: It’s been hard for me to move to using some palm oil at all, not that my tiny boycott made a difference, but since a friend in Ecuador told me about a sustainable development her team was working on I learned about the RSPO – Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. I only use it occasionally to sub out oils that people are allergic to, but when I do it carries the RSPO designation. Still makes me a bit nervous though.

So I showed the kid the OTR posts for her pictures, she was pleased with the posts and you folks kind comments. But, she wondered how I was able to write the posts, I wasn’t there. I told her, Google Maps is your friend. I looked at the map and found the trail and just followed it.

No surprise the orange fart cloud was, is and always will be stupid – even in his lies. Palm oil, like all such savior’s (including religious) always carries terrible consequences. Of course, it got its main start replacing hydrogenated foods (which were of course, told by our better’s – the corporate overloads – that all was safe – till the massive human guinea pig experiment that went on for decades went terribly south – big time.) Still, the rain has stopped, the weather warmer and it is another day here in the land of foreign slaughter, which is the so-called ‘land of the free”.

Well, typical ‘bad news’ morning but none-the-else, not a bad morning for most of us Jackals! Pay’s to live in the hyper super power. Climate, like our wars for oil, is of little consequence in our daily lives – until it isn’t.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that twitler has a Mar-a-Lago buddy with a forest raking service? I’m waiting to hear about his friend who has an alternate precision launching system for aircraft carriers, much better than hydraulic or electromagnetetic.

My theory on Trump’s idea* about raking: He has no experience with forests, only managed properties like Mar-a-Lago and golf courses. They need a lot of maintenance, including raking. So of course if we managed the forests the way he manages his properties, they must be raked. He’s never had a forest fire at any of his golf courses. He added in Finland because they have forests.

The palm oil thing is the kind of mistake we’re going to make again and again unless we start thinking in terms of systems problems. Reporters are particularly bad at wanting One Simple Solution, and they frame the way we talk and think about a lot of problems. I wrote a Twitter thread last night about another example.

4. This is going to come up again and again as we discuss global warming.

The problem is a systems problem. For example, the entire earth is warming, but because that changes the weather, some areas may get cooler. That does not, pace some ignoramuses, void the bigger picture.

@DanF: she also references the RSPO, which is the body working to encourage sustainable palm oil production.
But “what abouting” because meat production also encourages deforestation is a little disingenuous. In my (anecdotal) experience, anyone familiar with deforestation via palm oil plantations is usually vegan or a locavore.

While we’re on the topic of deforestation, there’s several brands of toilet paper available that don’t use trees. This one uses bamboo and sugar cane and isn’t bad at all. I ordered the starter kit and got lots of freebies too, though a few I’ll give away, since the last thing I need around here is more soap.

Providing the latest example of this horrifying trend, a Michigan woman seeking a heart transplant publicized a letter she received from the Spectrum Health Richard DeVos Heart and Lung Transplant Clinic—named after the late father-in-law of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—informing her that she is “not a candidate” for the procedure “at this time” because she needs a “more secure financial plan” to afford the required post-operation immunosuppressive medication.

The letter goes on to explicitly recommend “a fundraising effort of $10,000” to help pay for the drugs.

\@DanF:
Unsaid in all of this is that the planet cannot support 7 billion people living the way we currently do. Banning palm oil would be an improvement for the environment but it does not touch 1/10th of what banning meat would do. There is no way that ban will ever happen. The alternative would be to revert to more expensive production of all these products with the end result being billions who could not afford to eat.

Anyone here ever read “The Mote In Gods Eye”? It is a first contact SF story. We meet these aliens who have a problem. The problem has led them to develop an attitude they label as “crazy eddie” which boils down to “every problem has a solution but the solution creates a worse problem”. That philosophy may become our religion

@raven:
I was going to write a snarky reply about ‘how will they learn if we keep giving them handouts?’ but that shit isn’t funny anymore even when the target is the teabillies. Instead I will donate, I can’t imagine $9k is going to be enough to get them back up and running but its a start.

We use as much sustainable stuff as we can afford: local produce and humanely raised meat, cleaning products like baking soda and vinegar, supporting local crafters and small businesses.

But even as an animal rights activist I can’t go vegan, or even vegetarian. I get sick swiftly. Plus, I live with four rescue cats who are obligate carnivores. Vegans also use tons of modern products that have animal sources, whether they realize it or not.

Sustainable farming uses both plants and animals. It’s the cycle of life on this planet, and we aren’t going to tinker our way out of it.

Since this time of the week is generally nature-driven, vegetative or avian, I thought I’d share yesterday’s poem of the day. Short but lovely:

The Dew and the Bird
Alexander Posey

There is more glory in a drop of dew,
That shineth only for an hour,
Than there is in the pomp of earth’s great Kings
Within the noonday of their power.

There is more sweetness in a single strain
That falleth from a wild bird’s throat,
At random in the lonely forest’s depths,
Than there’s in all the songs that bards e’er wrote.

Yet men, for aye, rememb’ring Caesar’s name,
Forget the glory in the dew,
And, praising Homer’s epic, let the lark’s
Song fall unheeded from the blue.

Alexander Posey was born on August 3, 1873, near present-day Eufaula, Oklahoma, Creek Nation. The Poems of Alexander Posey (Crane, 1910) was collected, arranged, and posthumously published by Posey’s wife. He died on May 27, 1908.

@WereBear: so the little kitty with the collar hasn’t left my house for a couple of days. She hides in leaves under the bushes in front of the porch when she isn’t on the porch begging to come inside. I wish people understood what a frightening world it is for cats outside. The raccoons come looking for food so I take the bowls in at night, but she didn’t leave, just hid.
SIGH, I’m going to have to share my bedroom again. And walk the hood with her picture looking for her stupid owners.

@satby: Interesting blog post, I thought. I didn’t take what she wrote as ‘what-about-ism’ as much as she was trying to express that it’s an interlinked system, and that it all has an effect. E.g, she says ‘Taking the lead in the Deforestation Olympics is by far the animal agriculture industry. In Latin America alone, 2.71 million hectares of tropical forest is cleared each year to make way ranching land for cattle. This is 5 times more than any other commodity in the region’ and (to start paraphrasing rather than quoting) that a secondary effect is clear-cutting for soybeans to feed cattle, and so forth. By the time you get through all that, palm oil seems far down on the scale, comparatively.

@Schlemazel: I’ve read that. Several times. Going “crazy Eddie” is the aliens’ translation into English of a particular kind of insanity their species gets. Basically if they really learn to think like a human, then they will eventually go crazy Eddie. It didn’t evolve from hunan contact, but humans are nuts in a way that triggers it.

I also love (this might be in the sequel) an alien phrase that humans adopt: “On the one hand… on the other hand… but on the gripping hand…”

@Reboot: yes, I read the whole thing. All her points are valid enough, but you have to get deep into the article to surmise that she’s suggesting using sustainable palm… By which time she’s already made it seem like an empty gesture because meat.
And most people never read past headlines, so damage done there too. It’s a shame that an intelligent article can end up undercutting its own conclusions with a bad headline and long-winded argument.

@Immanentize: not too many people chip cats, but I can try to find out. The poor little girl is frantic to come inside, and avoids the heated shelter because the raccoons go in it at night looking for food.

@Schlemazel: I loved The Mote. But I thought at the time, and it’s more obvious now with our genetic engineering abilities, that a species with starships should have been able to offer a technological solution.

Oh boy. Elderly relative moved to a nursing home and since I’m the only member of my generation remotely near by, I find myself emptying the house she lived in for more than 50 years. Once I recover from this I’m going to do a serious purge of my things. Damn.

Regarding “raking”, I think the Pres* was talking about “forest thinning” as a tool for managing wildfire risk. The basic idea is to remove small trees and brush in fire-prone forests. A competent and not stupid president would have been able to get that idea from the briefings and explain it better than “the President of Finland talked about raking.”

Some problems with forest thinning include
1) it isn’t financially worthwhile for forest companies because little trees aren’t worth much, so they either want subsidies to do the work or the ability to harvest a lot of large trees, which environmentalists will oppose vigorously,
2) what do you do with the thinned material? It’s probably too small for lumber mills, and you can’t just leave it there. So do you subsidize trucking it out of the forest, perhaps to a biomass power plant? It’s probably too expensive to turn it into mulch and try to sell to suburban and city gardeners.

The Pres* and his allies probably want to clear cut these forests, so that will be something to watch for in the future.

Maybe the Pres* talked about setting up a cross-agency task force to work on forest fire issues in National Forests, but his bone-headed raking idea got all of the press. I can imagine President Obama coming to the fire site and talking for 20 minutes about his proposals for task forces and policy approaches.

@MomSense: I had to do that when my sister’s FIL died. They was no will so I went out and went through every pocket, drawer, nook and cranny trying to find one. The only saving grace was that I didn’t really know him. I look at my shit and think “who is going to want this 6 ft yellowfin tuna that I have on the wall”??

@satby: Congratulations on making the paper. That’s a nice photo of your soaps!

@raven: Keep posting it. It has been a slow weekend here and a lot of people haven’t been around to see it. Edit: Perhaps it could be frontpaged and that way it would also show up on Cole’s Twitter feed and more people would see it.

Getting ready for the 6-10 inches of snow expected later today. Just a few years ago we didn’t have our first snow until January. This will put us over a foot so far and we haven’t hit December. Today is decorate the house for the holidays day. And dealing with a horrible cold. I admit that I am one of those men that is a real wimp wen I get a cold. Fortunately Mrs. Japa is very nurturing (which is why I married a nurse).

We had to do that when my mom died. She had become a hoarder and her place was unmanageable. It’s interesting (in an unpleasant way) how disturbing a hoarder’s place can be, maybe because it’s such an overwhelming physical manifestation of mental disorder. We cleaned what we could and then handed it over to the professionals. I hope not to inflict such a burden on my children.

The bottom panels of the New York Post’s satiric front page story concerning a former editor of the National Enquirer writing a
tell-all book on David Pecker’s relationship with Trump is high low-humor.

I think the Pres* was talking about “forest thinning” as a tool for managing wildfire risk.

I think he was and is thinking “Donnie make a poo-poo!” every moment he ever opens his mouth, and it’s about as useful to apply logic and reason to his arguments as it would be for any other toddler. Refutations are for the bystanders who might still possess a germ of thought.

And BTW, thinning has to happen, and it’s not even controversial. It’s the best simulation we have of forest fires without doing an actual burn, and fire is a vital part of a healthy forest ecosystem, at least when you get away from the rain forest. It doesn’t provide huge timbers, but there’s plenty of usable lumber that comes out of it (usually used in parks). The smaller stuff they leave on the forest floor as habitat and erosion control.

We are going to hit the road soon for the drive to Rochester. Tests at Mayo tomorrow and I hope this will be the start of repair work that will make life worth living again. I’m as near giddy as an eeyore can be

She didn’t have children so she was totally devoted to my dad, aunt, and uncle. I found amazing photos of them as kids. Also found my photos from my grandparents’ wedding. There were pages of family genealogy.

The thing that is killing me is not being able to keep all of the needlepoint. I have so much already.

I’m repeating my grandmother’s mantra. Life is for the living. She enjoyed her things and now she has moved on. I can’t save everything.

@MomSense: @debbie:
I may have already told this story, but when my wife, Julie, was dying in the hospital, she caled my son and me over to her bedside and looked at me, pointed her finger at me and said, “Don’t hoard!” Then looked at the Immp, same finger, “And don’t let him hoard!” OK, so maybe I collect things I needn’t.

Anyway, as we were going through the house, getting Julie’s things together to give to the Women’s Shelter, we kept finding boxes of her shoes, from her adult life, in mostly pristine condition, still in boxes with the paper in the toes! In her closet of course, but also in the guest room closet and in the attic closet…. It came to about 80 pairs of very nice shoes from over 30 years of shoe shopping — add in the sports footwear (sneakers, hiking sandles, boots) and we probably hit 100…. Anyway, I assembled them all in the guest room, stacked and organized for donation. I brought in the Immp and said, “This, my son, is the definition of NOT hoarding.”

Ugh. In anticipation of something due to arrive mid-week, had to move around/relocate some electronics and a bunch of knickknacks in the living room. Realize it’s only the mind playing games with me but regardless the room now looks ‘wrong.’

@O. Felix Culpa: I am in the same pending position right now. I am living in my Mother’s house (it is actually a life estate property so when she dies we will have to move out). The house is so filled with stuff it is hard to move. She won’t throw anything out, and I mean anything. There are half a dozen old analog tvs stored in the bedroom upstairs that she refuses to get rid of. “Well they might come in useful one day” is her rationale. She has books everywhere. She has said time and time again “I hate to get rid of books” and yet she will never read them again. I have been going through them and keeping aside the first editions and ones that I think could be valuable but for the most part they will be donated as will the majority of knick knacks in her house. It is going to be a nightmare when the time comes.

@MomSense: I am in charge of dealing with my mother’s things. She grew up as the middle child of a farming family and never had many new things to call her own, so when she finally could, she collected. It has triggered me to downsize EVERYTHING I own.

The palm oil thing is the kind of mistake we’re going to make again and again unless we start thinking in terms of systems problems. Reporters are particularly bad at wanting One Simple Solution, and they frame the way we talk and think about a lot of problems.

@Immanentize: The attraction of shoes and purses is that they are beautiful and do not force any confrontation with your less than perfect body proportions when you try them on. They are pure enjoyment in the store.

By the time you get through all that, palm oil seems far down on the scale, comparatively.

What the article skips over is that the four different deforestation drivers mostly affect different forests. Soybeans are mostly a temperate zone crop, and cattle ranching is done in drier areas. The rainforests being cut down for palm oil production aren’t going to be cut down for either soybeans or cattle ranches. For global warming purposes the forests are somewhat interchangeable but for the orangutans, they aren’t.

That said, a boycott is a poor tool because the problem is the rainforest being converted to *any* human use – including in this case forestry, subsistence agriculture, and other cash crops. The only long term solution is for the Indonesian and Malaysian governments to have both the will and the capacity to keep at least very large areas as preserves.

Mayo worked a miracle for a friend of mine 15 ore more years ago. Hoping they can turn your life around.

I began reading thread comments from the bottom up, and when I saw these I was positive I had mistakenly wandered into one of those contentious and interminable mayonnaise-vs.-Miracle Whip, Hellmann’s-vs.-Duke’s-vs.-Kraft spats.

@Schlemazel: Now that I’ve linked back to your comment, let me add my own good wishes and hopes for you. Do please keep us all posted.

My wife came home from her father’s apartment and said “We’re getting rid of stuff!” We made it about 3 months.*

The Marie Kan book on organizing and cleaning inspired me to clean house for a while, although not by her drastic methods (which is basically pile EVERYTHING up to throw it away, and keep only the most meaningful or essential). But there was so much that the progress I made boiled down to reducing my books from double to single shelves and reducing the layers of junk in my closet to one. I am at least a lot better about not buying more to add to the piles but sadly my husband hasn’t gotten that particular message yet. Now if I could just get myself to throw out my CDs…

@Barbara: I have no problem with shoes — her tastes were extraordinary. In fact, I kept a couple of pairs just for ‘membrance sake — A beautiful bright green pair of Mizrahi shoes and a pair of Star Wars Vans

@Fair Economist: As we speak, I am burning all my CDs to an external server. Then I plan on giving them all to the local library. Huge space savings! Then, the albums? (FWIW, I am burning Loop right now)

I’m repeating my grandmother’s mantra. Life is for the living. She enjoyed her things and now she has moved on. I can’t save everything.

I saved a moderate amount of mementos from my father when he passed and eventually threw them out because I did not have time and space to appreciate them. It’s going to be very hard when my mother passes because she has a fairly large house filled to the brim with stuff, most of which carries memories for me. It’s going to kill me to dispose of the antique baby grand but there is just no way I could keep it and for all my fond memories of it I have no use for it now.

@meander: We own a cabin in Southern California, near Lake Arrowhead. We are required to rake the property around it every year and get rid of the pine needles.
I think he got his dumb idea from hearing Jerry Brown mention this, since Dummy in Chief switched where he heard it to some governor and he really doesn’t pay attention to what other people are saying.

@Litlebritdifrnt: You have my sympathy. My mom bought quadruplicates, nay, quintuplicates of so many things…and never used them. Fake oriental rugs, Tiffany lamp knockoffs, allegedly time-saving gadgets…all that might be useful “someday.” Among her baffling purchases included an electric 12-egg poacher. She lived alone. She never cooked. I don’t think it was ever taken out of the box. Multiply that by thousands. Stuff was piled near to the ceiling everywhere. There were just packing-peanut strewn narrow pathways in the house to navigate between mountains of stuff from room to room. And don’t open the closets!

@O. Felix Culpa: Kitchen gadgetry and china is a terrible source of junk. I have so many things I use very rarely – maybe once every couple years in some cases. But it’s really hard to throw them out because I *do* use them occasionally. So, even though I have a pretty large kitchen, there’s no place to put anything.

I’m coming to think that a necessary accompaniment to getting rid of stuff is simplifying my life – just choosing not to *ever* do that old recipe from my mom. But I’m not there yet.

If one doesn’t know that Iceland is a UK supermarket chain, that article could be a little confusing.

Still, the point is well taken. Palm oil, per se, is not the problem. Deforestation is the problem—and, especially in Brazil, beef production is the bigger cause of deforestation. Alas, Trumpao their new preznit seems to not give a shit.

I can relate to a weakness for shoes. But having moved from apartment to apartment to apartment my entire adult life, I’m always shedding both possessions and stuff. Over the past couple of months, I’ve begun to think I should now get rid of the stuff I don’t want anyone to find ever.

Ripping vinyl to digital is a considerably more involved process. It requires specialized hardware (no matter what computer you own, its internal analog-to-digital converter is a cheap crappy afterthought) and software. Even worse, it’s a slow process, especially if you fall into the trap of obsessing over click and pop removal.

If you really want to go there, Schiit Audio makes a good ADC that sells for $199.

@Fair Economist: I love kitchen gadgets and hang on to more stuff than I should too. Just to reassure you, there’s a HUGE difference between keeping some extra things and being a full-on hoarder. Can you walk on your floors without crunching on packing peanuts underfoot and without fear of avalanche from ceiling-high stuff-piles? Is your furniture clear enough of things that you can actually sit on, say, your sofa? If you can answer “yes” to these questions, then you are far from pathological hoarderdom. :)

I knew about deforestation, and am not (shudder) a vegan. A little bit locavore, living in the place I do we have mushrooms gathered on the farms we own, I visit the Farmer’s Market when I go shopping during the harvest season, like home-grown tomatoes, really! and Fresh Picked Corn on the Cob!! Who doesn’t love corn in the summertime? and tomatoes for bacon and tomato sammiches?!!!

@O. Felix Culpa: My in-laws’ house was starting to resemble that when we had to put them into a board and care. The spare bedrooms had stacks of newspapers 4 feet tall and before we wrestled the van away from my FIL he had driven back to his house and tossed stuff out of closets and dressers onto the floor, looking for God knows what. They both had dementia which we didn’t realize until they were separated for a couple of months while MIL was in the hospital. We didn’t realize because they covered for each other so perfectly and we lived 400 miles away. It took us a year to clear that house, going through every box and pile of stuff carefully because when we started we realized that there were family photos stored under the sink and at the bottom of big boxes with nothing else other than shipping peanuts. I think they might have “lost” pictures of my husband as a child because I have maybe two or three and I know they had a bunch of them that they never wanted to show me for fear I’d steal them, and that was when they were in their 40s.
At the end of that miserable year of commuting three hours each way to work on the place I got my husband and his brother to hire a painter and have new carpet installed in order to sell the place, and it sold in a snap for more money than it was worth six months later, so my in-laws had enough to pay for their care for the rest of their lives.

@WereBear: My problems are mostly massive amounts of paper–source for study/research. I keep being told that it’s only of use to me, but I find it hard to believe that material gathered over yrs with lots of time and money is essentaially worthless.

@O. Felix Culpa: Oh, I’m not a hoarder; I’m not worried about that. My husband is, a little, but it’s manageable. I just have come to the realization that half my housing budget is paying to store things I very rarely or never use and it’s a poor use of my financial resources, as well as a chore to clean and organize. I’m also thinking about moving to a 2-bedroom apartment (currently in a 3 bedroom 1750 sq. ft. house) after my son leaves and am trying to downsize so that would be possible.

Me too, wife collects history books, in WV there’s a history book, or two or three, for every county. And she wants them all! At least one can donate such a collection to a local library, I hope! I on the other hand, collect Sci Fi books, and have for around 60 years…

I built a garage with a shop/attic upstairs which has rocks (I collected them for years, have stopped lately as my collecting buddy went into a home for an odd form of dementia) as well as boxes and shelves full of books. There is a library room in the house, full, and I built a bookcase downstairs with a couple of hundred feet of shelf space, not full yet, but if I emptied the boxes…

And books are so heavy!

But the chairs are mostly free from stack of crap, some have books, tho, in the library.

@Fair Economist: I once lived in a compact apartment in Hong Kong, which I loved for its amazing views and small size, which forced me to limit acquisitions. We had everything needful nonetheless, and were very comfortable.

@opiejeanne: Wow. What an undertaking! My mom lived too far away, so our only option was to cull photos and keepsakes as quickly as possible and have the rest hauled out and dumped. We’ll never know what we missed…so we don’t miss it. :)

Porch cat update: she’s now inside and ensconced in my bedroom. Tomorrow we’ll go see if she has a chip and contact animal control to see if anyone lost her. If there’s no owner located she’ll join our crew of rescues, get immunizations and be put up for adoption. She’s a lover and quite chatty.

@MomSense: Everyone else has been replying to this, but I sure feel for you. We put my 94 year old father in a nursing home in January, and I spent all summer cleaning out the house they had lived in since 1965. It was a big house with lots of cupboards and closets, and my mother was amazing at packing stuff away.

My great grandfather was from a prosperous family and then he got rich, so lots of stuff, and they had big house to put the stuff in.

My mom’s family wasn’t rich, so nice stuff was rare and treasured.

When my dad’s family members died, somebody rented movers who packed stuff upmand moved it to the next generation’s house, which was always smaller.

My mom kept every single item. Two hand embroidered linen napkins that matched nothing. That sort of thing. I hate to send them to the landfill, but finding a home is time consuming. Took six months. Then my siblings come in bitching about where are the liien tablecloths they have had 40 years to express a faint interest in.